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Facebook’s New Friend-Sorting Features

By Paul Boutin September 14, 2011 6:58 pmSeptember 14, 2011 6:58 pm

This week, Facebook is rolling out two new features designed to make it easier to share posts with small groups of people who belong to the same family, city, workplace or school as you, and to separate your best friends from your so-so friends.

Facebook users have had the ability to create custom lists of their Facebook friends for a long time, but now Facebook will automatically create a few lists based on your profile information. You can edit these lists, which Facebook calls Smart Lists, and create new ones yourself.

To see if you’ve got the smart lists yet, look on the left side of your Facebook profile page. You should see a section titled Lists, with a list named Close Friends under it. There may be a few more, depending on what profile information you’ve entered. Lists based on your city, workplace, family or school will be updated as you add new friends whose profiles match yours on these criteria.

In addition, when you look at a friend’s profile, there’ll be a button at the upper right that pops up a menu to add them to one of two new standardized lists — Close Friends and Acquaintances. The Acquaintances list – friends whom you aren’t that close to – is an idea taken straight from Google+, the competing social network launched by Google in June.

What’s the difference between Close Friends and Acquaintances? On Facebook, a Close Friend is someone whose every post you want to see, and with whom you want to share more personal posts. An Acquaintance is someone you’re not so interested in sharing with. Facebook won’t put status updates by Acquaintances into your News Feed unless they change important profile information, such as their workplace or city. So you’ll learn if they get married, without having to see everything they post.

The core idea behind Facebook’s enhanced lists is that you can share a status update with only a list of friends, rather than with all of your Facebook friends (and their friends, and everyone else on Facebook, depending on your privacy settings). For example, if you post lots of baby photos, you might want to share them with only your family. To do that, look in the lower right corner of the box into which you type status updates. To the left of the Post button, Facebook is adding a pop-up menu that lets you choose a list to which the post will be restricted. Likewise, you can filter Facebook to see only status updates from the people on a specific list by clicking that list on the left side of the page.

Smart Lists are a response to the experience many Facebook users have of feeling overwhelmed by status updates from people they barely know, and of being afraid to post something because too many people they barely know (and maybe don’t get along with) will see it. Many Google+ users have raved about Google’s similar feature, called Circles, which does pretty much the same thing.

To keep Smart Lists from provoking real-world social drama when other users learn they’re not on your Close Friends list, Facebook is making another change along with their rollout. Previously, the names and memberships of your friend lists had been publicly visible by default. Now, they’ll be hidden. A Facebook spokeswoman says that when you share a post to a friend list, those friends will be able to see who else you shared the post with, but they won’t see the name of your list. So if they’re actually on a list named Relatives I’m Not So Crazy About, they’ll never know.

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